I'm returning to this post about nature. Nature was seen by the left politics of the 1980s as timeless, unchanging raw material that was dynamized and rendered historical through the activities of the cultural. Mind imposes its categories on an inert nature. Nature was deemed to be the opposite of culture; culture was outside nature; or beyond the natural. On this account discourse constitutes its object, and there is no outside of language.

I was always uncomfortable with this social constructivism as I undertood nature to be changing, dynamic and historical. I was uneasy with the way the poststructuralist left assumed that culture writes on and scripts nature. Nature was what had to be overcome. It puzzled me that in the natural/cultural duality nature was assumed by many on the radical side of politics to be timeless, unchanging raw material after Darwin.

Had they not read Darwin? Did they not understand that evolution was about change and difference? Darwin's concept of natural selection is that organisms better adapted to a particular environment are more successful in reproducing and passing on their adaptations. But the critics viewed natural selection as a weak and limited force that only culled negative traits. To the contrary, Darwin argued that natural selection was the dominant force of evolution. Moreover, it could build up the fitness of organisms by gradually selecting "positive" traits that better adapted an individual to its environment. Did the postructuralists have no understanding of the biological sciences and theway they held that evolution worked in terms of gradual changes?

Where was their materialism? Was everything to be about models of language and representation. An idealism?
Had they not read Nietzsche, or grasped the way he understood nature after Darwin in terms of a natural world being a productive set of forces, which confront each other and then work out their relations?

So I turned away from cultural studies, because of the way it made nature redundant. Culture and representation do have an outside---storms, droughts, dust--and this outside is a world of change and emergence. It is not an unchanging given. Nature is full of these chaotic forces that we don’t really control, and at best what we can do is carve out a location, a territory, and in the process of carving out a territory, which is the primordial impulse of architecture, we also carve out something like a body for ourselves..